My (Insanely Large) List of SEO Tools & Other Useful Resources

I’m just about to reach the 5 year mark working in the online marketing industry, and one thing that I’ve always found remarkable is how open and sharing people in this line of work tend to be. Whether it’s strategies, tactics, updates, techniques or tools – folks in this space do a lot of sharing, and often the depth and breadth is outstanding.

I find this to be true online and offline – I read a lot of industry blog posts and attend many workshops and conferences and people are typically quite passionate about what they do; and that passion frequently translates into contributions to the rest of us in the online marketing community.

Nowadays, as an SEO Strategist on Team Portent, the bulk of my day-to-day professional work involves a lot of, well, SEO-related diagnosis and recommendations. And just like you wouldn’t send a carpenter or a plumber out to do a job without a proper set of tools, we online marketers need tools that help us to be more productive than we would be otherwise. During my day-to-day work, I use a combination of Portent’s stellar internal toolset and a host of other tools as well.

Some time ago I started keeping a list of tools on an Excel spreadsheet because it’s just too hard to keep everything in my head (I named the file my “forget-me-not” list of tools). I read a lot of industry blogs every day and if someone mentions some tool and it seems like something I can use now or in the future, I log it on my spreadsheet for future investigation or use.

So now I have this giant list of tools that I want to share with you. But first, a shameless plug:

Cut the Talk – It’s Time to Rock

You probably already know about many or most of these tools, but I’d bet that you’ll find at least one cool tool here you’ve never used before – and that will make it worth your time to scan the list or bookmarking this page for future reference.

I’ve broken this down to logical-to-me categories, but you may prefer a different organizational scheme. Also, it’s true that many of these tools “fit” into more than one category and can be used for multiple tasks, so there is that to keep in mind. I’ll also mention that you may find my extremely short descriptions inadequate (please be kind, I typically would enter the tool to my spreadsheet with some hastily-typed or copy/paste from the site to cue me as to what the tool could be used for). But setting all that aside, what’s important is that someone, hopefully you, will find this list useful.

Last notes: I’ve been keeping this list just for my own personal benefit, and I’m not being compensated in any way by any tool or resource you see on this list. My descriptions are purposely very short making it easy for you to scan this list. So without further ado, here’s my insanely large list of tools. Want to download the spreadsheet? No problem, do that at the bottom of this post.

Competition Research

Sure, you don’t want to “take your eye off the ball” with respect to your site and overall digital marketing strategy – but you don’t want to be caught sleeping either while your competitors pass you by (excuse the mixed metaphors). You can learn a lot from what your competitors are doing well or even doing poorly when it comes to online marketing. I recommend you do periodic research on your competition and keep your finger on the pulse of your industry at large.

Content Strategy

This very cool tool from Richard Baxter and the Builtvisible team helps you plan your content strategy intelligently, using keyword research and estimating your audience size. Their description of the tool is “Easily consolidate trending news from across the web, and find inspiration for your research topics quickly and easily”.

FWE allows you to check on or keep track of a set of terms over time, and helps you get a sense for what type of content gets a lot of mentions, shares, and links. Many more uses, features keep getting added.

Online Reputation Management

PPC

Note: although I’ve been AdWords certified for years and have run some small campaigns, I don’t necessarily consider myself a “PPC” guy” or expert (we have those here, though) – so my list of PPC tools is not particularly extensive, to put it nicely. Feel free to send me your non-commercial suggestions to add here via Twitter (@dportney) – thanks!

Rank Checking

The relative importance of checking rankings is debatable. In fact, it was at @SEMpdx SearchFest industry conference where I heard my first full-blown rant from @ConradSaam about the uselessness of checking rank (he recommended focusing on traffic and conversions) – that was 4 years ago and before the Google Hummingbird algorithm update and before Google started rewriting queries based on perceived user intent. I’ve used and still use rank checkers, but the effectiveness of SEO strategies based on keyword ranking really seems to be dying if not already dead. That said, here’s some tools I’ve used:

Site Analysis

I love doing site analysis. Whether it’s a relatively quick SEO Triage, a comprehensive SEO Audit, or even a full-blown SEO Strategy Playbook, conducting a thorough site analysis and providing recommendations is one of my favorite tasks in SEO-land. Here are some tools that I use and that will make your analyses faster, easier, and more comprehensive.

Some web servers enable HTTP compression and conditional GET to reduce bandwidth usage with browsers that support these technologies. Use this tool to test whether a webpage supports HTTP compression and conditional GET.

Conclusion

You can greatly improve your efficiency and productivity by using these tools – that certainly has been my experience. I’m confident that you’ll find at least one tool on this list that will be beneficial to you. If you want to download an Excel spreadsheet containing all of these tools you, grab that here. I’m also confident you’ll know of a tool or two that is not listed here that you think should be, so feel free to share those with all of us in the comments below.

And finally, if you need some help with hands-on best practices to put these tools together for technical SEO wizardry, remember to pick up the ebook.

Damn. That’s a whole boatload of tools and I stopped reading after the Competition Research and just started scrolling. I have a desire now to do a blog post where I use all of these tools for one site! Oh, but you missed a couple of my favorites: Raven Tools (Competitive, Link Building, Content and Reporting) http://raventools.com Beam Us Up (Research) Free unlimited site crawl toolhttp://beamusup.com Licecap (reporting) Free GIF screencap creation tool http://www.cockos.com/licecap/

Thanks Jeremy – feel free to download the spreadsheet, I’ve got the entire list pivot-tabled with “slicers” so you can more easily search, find, sort, and generally have your way with the data. Be sure to ping me when/if you write that blog post!

I thought I had the biggest list of tools but this is marvelously “insane”. The internet now is such a treasure trove of useful things. Have left my blogs for quite a while and its now time to ramp up again. These will keep me busy for months so a HUGE thank you.

All these tools are great, but from a practical standpoint, how do you justify the investment? I’m guessing you don’t have subscriptions to all of them at the same time, but what advice would you give to in-house or agency marketers into preparing a business case for this investment, aside from a pithy “it will save you time” argument? Really interested in hearing your views on that as someone that has experience with a as wide a toolset as you do.

I don’t have a one size fits all method for you or people in general to convince higher-ups that tools are worth the investment (note that many, many of the tools I shared are free) but one might consider tracking the time it takes to “go the long way” to get data, perform analyses (etc.) compared to the time saved when using a tool multiplied out across time and across clients / tasks as applicable – that way it’s not just “we’ll save time” but “we’ll save X time which translates to Y money saved compared to Z cost of tool”. Hope that helps!

Awesome list!! Thank you for sharing. Another great (free) tool I’ve just recently discovered and begun using for keyword research is Soovle.com. It gives you the top searches for a number of search engines & eCommerce sites based on a keyword that you enter. Pretty interesting data and very fast way to build keyword lists. Thanks again!

Thanks, glad you like the list! – Soovle is actually on the download file located at the end of the blog post, but editors had to cut some tools for space on the blog post itself… but thanks for stopping by and commenting!